Magnolia tree

JUMELO the lovely couple animators

Jumi and Eloic are animating on my film. It is fun being together, this time for work. We've been given a large space to work in with lots of light. It is perfect. Armelle will be joining us begining of May. The animation is going very well and I am very happy with what we've got so far.
Yesterday The weather got really warm here, it was lovely to take a walk around. here in Ciclic, in front of my desk there is a window to the garden and there is a magnificent magnolia tree FULL of light pink flowers. I will put up a picture of it soon. It distracts me a lot as it is so surreal to see a tree with absolutely no leaves and full with flowers.
I have to finish the Posing and start animating soon! OK back to work!

Animating, day 4

Jumi and Eloic are animating the first sequence and we've 22 seconds by far. I am doing the posing and hopefuly will soon join them! we've got 11.40 minutes to animate and only until end of september here in Ciclic. It rains a lot here in Chateau Renault which is not so bad when you have to work and can't go out!

CICLIC in Chateau Renault!

We are In Chateau Renault at Ciclic, see more on the site:
 http://www.ciclic.fr/actualites/beach-flags-un-nouveau-film-en-residence-chateau-renault

we are warming up before animating by drawing the characters.

On Folimage's blog!

 an article about Beach Flags on Folimage's blog:

http://www.folimage.fr/fr/blog/beach-flags_59.4.htm

Layout Posing

I'm doing a little bit of posing before going to Ciclic next week and starting the animation. Unfortunately I don't have the time to really get into it , so I guess I will continue when I'm there, while animation is being done. The animators are Jumi Yoon and Eloic Gimenez and another friend who will be assisting us is Armelle Mercat. you can find the blogs of all these lovely people on my blog. So this is my last week in Valence after over 5 months of work here! it has passed sooo fast!

The voices have been recorded!

 

The voices were recorded last friday and I think all of the actors were just great! thanks to everyone and hope to meet you all again soon :)

Recording the voices

As we will soon start animating, the voices need to be recorded now for lip-synching. We'll be 6 for about 10 voices! I'm counting on the actors to try different characters with different voices/or ways of speaking. The spoken language of the film is Farsi/ Persian so I had to find Iranian actors. It wasn't that easy to do that here is France, or I didn't know that many people, but finally I was lucky to find 4 really good actresses.We'll record tomorrow in Paris and I'll see three of the actresses for the first time! I am in Valence so we've practiced the dialogues over the phone up until now. In the beginning I thought this is strange, but then, I thought practicing over the telephone wasn't such a bad idea after all... you only have the voice so you listen better I think :) let's hope everything goes well tomorrow as we only have 2 hours in the studio!

I just got the news that Beach Flags has won yet another grant/bourse! this time for it's music! Yan Volsy who I have the pleasure to work with will be composing the music for the film and he will be spending a week in the residency of Chaise Dieu with a group of musicians (which my lovely sister is one of them I hope!).This will be next December. great news!

http://auvergne.france3.fr/2013/02/07/pour-aider-la-creation-de-musique-de-court-metrage-une-residence-la-chaise-dieu-195959.html

Women's Beach

New stuff!

We are still continuing on the coloring the backgrounds. Here you can see the rice fields and a jewelry.

Colored backgrounds

Here are some backgrounds with color. We use photoshop and textures that we made with ink, which gives the images a watercolor effect. The location is in the north of Iran, in Bandar Anzali.these background are done by Jean Bouthors.

Background Layout

France / Valence / Studio Folimage / 4th month of pre-production of "Beach Flags"
Thanks to my super layout man "Jean", yesterday we finished the background layouts and tomorrow we'll start coloring them.We've got around 158 scenes to color... a lot of work! but everything's going well and I'm excited to finally see some colors!
okay! back to work!

We added some shadows... must say I like this and I think it's final!

Layout Décors

Today we start the layout for the backgrounds while there is a little risk of changing some scenes in the animatic during the week. Arte has to give me validation to take the next step, but I had to take the chance because Jean who helps me with layout might not be available later and we start by sequences were I'm pretty sure I don't want to change. It is nice to start a new phase of the project.

Beach Flags concept art

Some graphic research I had done before. But now I have decided to use much less colours. I will post some of my new work soon. Right now I am working on my character design before we start animation in April. Here is The trainer!

okay, so I have just a few days between the animatic and the back grounds layout, to work a bit more on the graphics of my film. I have tried some stuff that look so nice but would not be easy to animate such as this style which I like a lot. as the film has a very fast rythm, a rather complicated story, and  a small animating team, I have to choose a more simple style I guess...

cutting and cutting

we are deleting nice moments in the film to fit the film into the right timing... it is so hard! these images are gone!

graphic research

Vida was drawing instead of studying when her mother comes into the kitchen.
this scene is already cut out of the story...